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Gertrude Cox

Gertrude Mary Cox (1900 - 1978) American statistician, first woman elected to the International Statistical Institute and president of the American Statistical Association from 1956 to 1959.

Born in Dayton, Iowa, Cox at first intended to become a Methodist Episcopal minister and director of an orphanage, but in college she heeded a new calling of statistics to help Iowan farmers make better agricultural research, and she earned degrees from Iowa State College and later the Univesity of California-Berkeley. In 1940, Cox became the first director of experimental statistics at North Carolina State University, where she trained the staff of the Crop Reporting Service of the USDA. She spent the last decades of her life lobbying to improve the teaching of statistics in the South.